In Praise of Precocious Narrators

Related Books:

1.In Dan Chaon‘s story “Prodigal,” from his collection Among the Missing, the narrator says: “When I was young, I used to identify with those precociously perceptive child narrators one finds in books. You know the type. They always have big dark eyes. They observe poetic details, clear-sighted, very sensitive… Now that I have children of my own… I think of that gentle, dewy-eyed first person narrator and it makes my skin crawl.”

A New York Times review of the recent novel Mercury Under My Tonguepraised the book by saying of its protagonist, “Fortunately, unlike the precocious child narrators that populate so much fiction, there isn’t a whiff of gee-whiz wonderment or innocence about him.”

I love precocious narrators. Of course the child narrator is not a new construct, but some of the most buzzed-about novels of the 2000s, such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, have featured memorable young leads. The books have met with both exuberant acclaim and accusations of being cloying, gimmicky, mannered, precious, faux-innocent, forced, unbelievable, exasperating, show-offy, or just plain annoying. But I admire the books’ inventiveness, and I love the characters’ idiosyncratic voices, unapologetic intelligence and bold curiosity. And, like Chaon’s narrator, and probably like many lifelong readers, I see a bit of myself in them.

2.

With so many precocious children and their quirks to keep track of, here is a guide to some of the genre’s recent standouts:

Special Topics in Calamity Physics: Blue van Meer, 16, who never met a simile, metaphor, parenthetical quip, reference, citation, or Strategic Capitalization she didn’t like. Her mother died in a car accident; Dad is a brilliant, nomadic, and pompous professor.

Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love: Alma Singer, 14, who keeps a notebook called “How to Survive in the Wild” inspired by her adventurous father, who died of cancer. She is trying to find the author of an old novel that her mother is translating.

Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet: T.S. Spivet, 12, a cartography genius traveling by train, alone, from a Montana ranch to Washington, DC, to accept an award at the Smithsonian.

3.
In each of these books, told in first-person, voice is central. Reviewers often remark that the protagonists sound nothing like a “real” child or teenager. But aside from Curious Incident, which is meant to be a feat of channeling—this is how the world looks through the eyes and brain of an autistic boy—reality and fidelity are not of primary concern. Lacking much real-world and life experience, the characters filter their lives through film noir, cowboy movies, detective stories, Jewish mysticism, novels and history.

As T.S. says before beginning his train journey, “I guess I was a sucker for historical myth just like Father. But whereas his Spiral of Nostalgic Unfulfillment was directed at the cinematic West of the trail drive, one need only whisper the phrase ‘bustling railroad town’ to raise my blood pressure a notch.” Alma’s hero is the aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who disappeared during WWII. Blue describes Hannah Schneider, the film teacher whose mysterious death fuels the book’s plot, as straight out of a black and white classic:

She had an elegant sort of romantic, bone-sculpted face, one that took well to both shadows and light… Within her carriage… was a little bit of the Paramount lot, a little neat scotch and air kisses at Ciro’s. I felt, when she opened her mouth, she wouldn’t utter the crumbly speak of modernity, but would use moist words like beau, top drawer and sound (only occasionally ring-a-ding-ding).

These influences from previous eras create an internal logic for each book. The trick is similar to that of the movie Brick, which transported the conventions of ‘30s detective fiction to a Southern California high school. Would a high schooler say “No, bulls would gum it. They’d flash their dusty standards at the wide-eyes and probably find some yegg to pin, probably even the right one”? Of course not. But as Salon’s Andrew O’Hehirwrote of the film, “it’s an engrossing fantasy picture that in some ways gets close to the feeling of teenage life, even though it bears almost no relationship to its reality.”

4.
For his Spring 2008 ready-to-wear collection, Marc Jacobs designed shoes that had squat heels jutting out backwards, horizontally, from the ball of the foot. I love shoes as much as I love reading, and found this pair quite special: Jacobs had managed to rearrange conventional elements into something whimsical, and expand the idea of what a shoe can be.

Most books fit within a remarkably limited format, but formal inventiveness is a salient trait of these novels. Like children, they don’t always follow the rules. The books include maps and diagrams in the margins; pages in color and marked up with a red correction pen; illustrations and photos; blank pages; pages with type so dense they’re unreadable; foot notes and citations; chapters named for classic books or numbered with increasing prime numbers; and codas of a mathematical proof (Curious Incident), a Final Exam (Special Topics), and a flip book (Extremely Loud). According to critics like B.R. Myers, whose article “A Bag of Tired Tricks” appeared in The Atlantic upon the publication of Extremely Loud, my enjoyment of such “spurious playfulness” makes me “easily amused.”

But I don’t see these flourishes as gratuitous examples of “look at me! I’m different and clever!” T.S. makes sense of the world through mapping, and as he deals with the recent death of his younger brother “during an accident with a gun in the barn that no one ever talked about,” the tragedy’s repercussions are fittingly explored in the margins. Christopher’s brain functions in an emotionally detached, logical/mathematical/schematic way that necessitates diagrams. I found Extremely Loud’s backwards-flipbook, in which photos show a leaping body rising upwards alongside one of the twin towers, a moving visualization of Oskar’s biggest wish. Plus, it’s simply fun to turn the page and find a picture. It’s a fitting throwback to children’s books, as well as a nod to the hyperlinked/sidebar-ed/multimedia texts we read, without fuss, online.

The playfulness extends to language. More than any book I can remember, Special Topics delights in inventive, extended description. Listen to Blue riff on a central character:

He was a Goodnight Moon (Brown, 1947). Goodnight Moons had duvet eyes, shadowy eyelids, a smile like a hammock and a silvered, sleepy countenance… Goodnight Moons could be male or female and were universally adored. Even teachers worshipped them. They looked to Goodnight Moons whenever they asked a question and even though they answered with a drowsy, wholly incorrect answer, the teacher would say, ‘Oh, wonderful.’

5.
None of the precocious narrators are Goodnight Moons. In fact, let’s call them The Outsiders (Hinton, 1967), though with less class warfare. They do not fit easily into the world. Aside from Alma’s Russian immigrant pen pal, none of them has a true friend his or her own age; professors, teachers, parents, grandparents and strangers to whom they write letters provide a tenuous social life. They are unpopular at school, lonely, awkward, weird.

I was not a 12-year-old cartography genius or pint-sized private eye, but I was an overachieving kid who took a while to figure out how to be smart without being an annoying show-off—a quality of precocious narrators that often bugs readers. I recently re-read the journal that I kept through high school, which was not all that long ago. The content breakdown is approximately 60% about boys, 30% about how lonely I felt, and 10% about how great I was doing on my AP physics tests. I had forgotten about the time I gossiped about how academically stupid my crush’s girlfriend was, and then he confronted me about it via AIM conversation. Which is to say, I really could have used a bookish friend like Alma or Blue. (And like Blue, whose father quizzes her on vocabulary and makes her perform readings of classic plays during long car trips, I had parent-assigned summer homework. I remember writing short reports about the book Cheaper by the Dozen and the sport of diving; homework earned points, which could be redeemed for sodas and CDs.)

The books also nimbly capture how, when brains trump social skills, you end up feeling both older and younger than everyone around you. Alma and Blue are clueless about boys and have disastrous first kisses, but are ambitious enough to unravel complicated mysteries. And that’s what’s heartbreaking about these books: they put smart kids in the position to feel like they can, and should, come up with answers to some of life’s biggest questions.

Because for all their cuteness, the novels are really about surviving death and loss. Several of the characters assemble literal survival kits, that include items like a telescope, compasses, drafting paper, duct tape, a stuffed animal, a snakebite kit, iodine pills, Swiss Army knives, a copy of Edible Plants and Flowers in North America, and Juicy Juice boxes. But what good is a compass or stuffed animal—where can you go, and what second-rate comfort will you find?—when you are a child whose parent or sibling has died?

6.
As a culture, we have an odd relationship with high-achieving youths. The media scrambles to cover four-year-old abstract artists, 12-year-old fashion bloggers, 13-year-olds who climb Mt. Everest—but we regard the little prodigies with a mix of admiration, disbelief, mistrust and even hostility. (Witness the backlash against some of the precociously talented young novelists themselves, like accusations that Pessl only got a book deal because she’s pretty, and the phenomenon of “Schadenfoer“; note the glee people are taking in mocking Krauss’ recent over-the-top blurb.)

The other day, I overheard a commercial advertising a contest that would reward “the fastest, most accurate texter.” Then I learned that Jersey Shore’s The Situation had inked a book deal.

In an age of shortening attention spans and the glorification of stupidity, I find it comforting and exciting to spend time with young characters for whom books, maps, notebooks, letters, research, drawings, imagined inventions and classic films are central and essential. Precocious narrators, and the ambitious novelists who create them, give me hope that our culture can keep evolving without sliding into Idiocracy, and stand as proof of the power of intelligence, imagination, curiosity, and even “gee-whiz wonderment.”

In The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, T.S. coins the term “Stenpock,” after his science teacher, Mr. Stenpock. A Stenpock is someone “who insists on staying within the confines of his or her job title and harbors no passion for the offbeat or the incredible.” Precocious narrators are anti-Stenpocks, and I’m a sucker for them.

Anne Shulock
is a journalist living in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Jezebel, Salon and Sactown magazine, and she blogs on Open Salon. She is currently the editorial assistant at Zoetrope: All-Story, where she hopes to find the next great short story writer in the slush pile.

A brief series on my recent Mediterranean trip. Part three: Bitez.I first heard it when we were walking down the red brick path that separates the sand from the beachside bars and restaurants (Full English Breakfast, anyone?) in Bitez. It was a buzzing, wailing sound, undulating and crackling. “That’s the adhan, the call to prayer,” Emre told me.Perhaps I’ve listened to too much NPR and my mind has become too attuned to the cross-cultural juxtapositions that are meant to be thought-provoking to the conscientious citizen of our globalized world. Perhaps I’m just a flaneur. But I couldn’t help but file away as a key moment the dissonance between what I was seeing and hearing. If I was going to write about this trip, I was going to write about this.And, well, here we are.But it wasn’t all nearly so revelatory as that. This leg of our Turkish trip was a fairly standard beach vacation cut through with many moments reminding us we weren’t in Fort Lauderdale. It was a beach vacation with an element of surprise.Lauren and I landed via ferry in Bodrum, the beachy hub of the region, and, met by Emre, took the “crazy bus” to Bitez, a few bays down a long peninsula that is pocked with resorts. Ours was Ambrosia, a pretty standard place save for the mosque-like dome that roofed the lobby.In Greece, we had done some serious eating, but in Turkey our consumption shifted into overdrive. I don’t think we ever saw a menu. Emre and his parents would order for the table in Turkish and then the food would just start coming, course after course in many cases. In Bitez and Bodrum, we would get our first taste of kebap (the preferred spelling of kabob over there); pide, the Turkish version of pita, topped with finely chopped meat or cheese and baked; kadaif, a sweet cheese-filled pie with a top crust of crispy, finely shredded dough; and seafood of many kinds.And then of course there was the raki (pronounced rok-uh), which was not unlike the Greek ouzo but a touch less sweet and consumed in a rather ceremonious fashion. Also joining us in Turkey were our friends Roland and Heather. Roland and I (and Lauren) went to college with Emre, who became somewhat notorious for introducing his fellow students to this unique Turkish beverage. But the ballet at the Turkish dinner table is a far cry from our college tradition of swilling glasses of raki between beers from the keg.Like the Greeks and their ouzo, the Turks take their raki with ice and water, but whereas the ouzo, in our experience, was more of a self-serve operation, raki is the domain of Turkey’s attentive waiters. First they go around the table pouring a few fingers of raki into each glass. Then another round with a bottle of water — unless you don’t take water, as was the case with Roland and Emre, sometimes to their detriment. Then around a third time with a bucket of ice, dropping a cube or three into the glasses. Upon contact with the ice, the raki (like ouzo) turns a milky white, hence its nickname, Lion’s Milk.The ice and water chill the raki and take the edge off, and you are left with a smooth, anise-flavored beverage. When your glass is empty, the waiter returns promptly with the raki, then water, then ice (if you pour in the water or ice before the raki, the liquor will crystallize), unless of course you don’t take water, a fact the waiter is supposed to remember from the first round on. In Turkey, the waiters were plentiful – restaurants sometimes seemed filled with them – and except at the most “modern” places, all male.Bitez offered ample comforts. One day, we walked along the beach around Bitez’s cozy bay, passing many resorts and restaurants to a point of land jutting into the water. At the top of the slope were a few covered bar areas and below were several terraced landings with umbrellas and chairs which led out to a dock and the water, where swimmers occasionally thrashed about.Emre and his friends played backgammon (I would have to wait until later to challenge him) and we all drank bottles of Efes, the national beer. Later a man came around with a platter ringed with lemons and piled high with glistening black mussels stuffed with rice. We crowded in and he served us one by one around the circle, expertly flipping half the shell off and scooting it under the mussel and rice mixture but above the other half of the shell. You would use the extra shell like a spoon, making it a messy, but incredibly fresh and delicious finger food. We would see these midye dolma vendors several times both at the beach and in Istanbul, but it was hard to imagine eating the mussels anywhere but in that setting.If the beachside resort was nice, the boat trip we took was amazing. Emre’s parents arranged for it: a 70-foot boat, ours for the day, sailing from cove to cove. The Aegean, once you get into the narrow bays and inlets of the Turkish coast, is so sheltered as to be nearly perfectly calm. It is also crystal clear, very salty, and remarkably fizzy. Splash around and you feel like you’re soaking in a glass of soda.If there is a vacation ideal that I could conjure up, it would very closely resemble the eight or so hours we spent on that boat. Upon anchoring, we would dive from the side of the boat into the sea, floating around, buoyed by the saltiness. Then it was back in the boat as we sailed around a barren cape into another unspoiled cove. At lunch, we each had a grilled, whole bronzino and a selection of mezze. In the afternoon, we had tea time, with pastries and coffee. Emre says you can do this for five days at a time, sleeping on the deck of the boat. I can’t even imagine.Emre has touched on Turkey’s complicated politics over the years on this blog. It lay in the background of his series called “Barracks Reading,” in which he discussed the books he read during his compulsory army service. Every male in Turkey must serve in the army, though the location and duration varies. Emre’s army service was short and kept him out of harm’s way, a result of his living in the west, having the means to pay some fees, and having a full-time job that he needed to make sure he got back to. That Emre is, as anyone would be, conflicted about this has come through in his writing as well.Our bartender at Ambrosia, a very friendly young man who promised and delivered a bunch of green mandarins that grow locally to Emre’s mom, had recently completed his military service in the southeast, battling Kurdish separatists. It was hard to imagine the guerrilla warfare going on on the other side of the country as we sat late into the night at the beach-side bar, sipping our drinks.We would get another reminder that Turkey is at war as we waited for our plane to Istanbul at the Bodrum airport. Heads turned as a well-dressed man became extremely agitated, shouting at airline workers in the small concourse. Emre translated for us. The man had found out that morning that his brother had died in the southeast; he had missed his flight to get back to his grieving family; he was distraught and devastated.The concourse fell silent as the man yelled. Around him, Turkish and other European travelers looked and then averted their eyes. The ticket agents who were the target of his rage calmed him down. Then slowly, people began talking again, their thoughts turning back to getting home after their vacations.See Also:Part 1, 2, 4

In his most recent article for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell asserts that “one way to make sense” of To Kill a Mockingbird “is to start with Big Jim Folsom.” It’s a thesis that rings all the Gladwell bells. There’s the near-nonsequiter. There’s the insistence that to understand something you thought you already understood, you have to know about something Gladwell knows about (in this case James “Big Jim” Folsom, an Alabama governor of the 1950s). And there’s the hedge, the stab at plausible deniability: well, this is only one way to do it. But on the evidence of Gladwell’s obtuse reading, starting with Big Jim Folsom is precisely not a way to make sense of Harper Lee’s novel. Rather, it is a way to make a hash of it.The flaws in Gladwell’s scorched-earth positivism, in both its rococo and its populist moods, have been so amply documented – and not only in the Letters page of The New Yorker – that it may be time for a counter-backlash. The high dudgeon with which The New Republictook Gladwell’s most recent book, Outliers, to task seemed to me to miss some of the charms that have landed it on the bestseller list. Disregard the sociological claptrap, and it’s clear that Gladwell is not a scientist, but an entertainer. The pleasure we take in his arguments – in which Laban Movement Analysis becomes the key to dog training, and football to teaching, and Lawrence of Arabia to Rick Pitino, or vice versa – is the pleasure of the high wire act, or, more aptly, that of the magic show. If things go well, the audience gets a little fizz of insight. If the trick goes wrong, nobody gets hurt, because, after all, there never really was a rabbit in that hat.There is something unheimlich, however, about watching Gladwell bring his rhetorical illusionism to bear on the already illusory realm of literature. In his glib reduction of Harper Lee’s most enduring fictional creation to a “Jim Crow liberal,” he misses the forest for the trees.The raison d’être for Gladwell’s debut as a literary critic, we are told, is that “a controversy… is swirling around the book on its fiftieth anniversary.” Well, now it is. This controversy apparently has something to do with “Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism,” and to resolve it, Gladwell decides to re-open the trial of the falsely accused Tom Robinson, which is the novel’s climax. Some historical evidence is dragged in, but we will pass over in silence Gladwell’s conflation of “cases of black-on-white rape” with “allegations of black-on-white rape.” The point is to re-examine Robinson’s defense attorney, Atticus Finch.According to Gladwell, Finch has perpetrated a kind of ideological malpractice. To wit:Finch wants his white, male jurors to do the right thing. But… he dare not challenge the foundations of their privilege. Instead, Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another.More galling, to Gladwell, than this refusal to bait his jury is the turn-the-other-cheek ethic underlying it. Finch tells his daughter that it is not O.K. for her to hate anyone, even Hitler. “Really? Not even Hitler?” Gladwell asks. The question would be a gratuitous flourish, except that it discloses Gladwell’s supra-rational frustration with Finch’s “hearts and minds” approach to the world’s ills. You see, this approach “is about accommodation, not reform.”If Finch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict. But he isn’t. He’s not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law.Well, obviously. Otherwise Harper Lee would have named him Thurgood Marshall, or Shmurgood Shmarshall, and would have made him a heroic civil-rights reformer. But in addition to not being Thurgood Marshall, Atticus Finch is also a fictional character. This is not a trivial observation. Contradictions, blemishes, and blind spots are to be cherished in characters (and, some would say, in real people). Indeed, one way of reading the end of the novel is not that Atticus Finch has hypocritically “decided to obstruct justice” with his crony the sheriff, as Gladwell would have it, but that he has come to see the shortcomings in the inflexible moral code for which Gladwell has earlier chided him. He has discovered that all men are not the same, that the criminal Bob Ewell (incest, assault) and the innocent Boo Radley (reclusiveness, pallor) must be held to different standards.Certainly, Finch’s notions about racial equality do not match the liberal nostrums of our day. It would be weird if they did. Moreover, they may (or may not) be Lee’s notions. To Kill a Mockingbird certainly contains more than its fare share of racial stereotypes, which, like its accommodationist view of race, are worth discussing (as are the elements of Oliver Twist that today make us cringe). A more nuanced article might have made the argument that To Kill a Mockingbird has a didactic streak, and that it puts Atticus Finch forward as an allegorical figure of enlightenment. Or that readers of the book have mistakenly read him allegorically, rather than as a human being with human limitations. Or that To Kill a Mockingbird is not a very good book, and is racist to boot. Indeed, the latter may have been Gladwell’s reaction on taking up the book again in 2009.But he hasn’t chosen to make any of those arguments. And so his triumphant conclusion – “A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism” – rankles. No, we want to say, it tells Malcolm Gladwell about Jim Crow liberalism. Slighting the novel’s achievement on account of its anachronisms is like dismissing Huckleberry Finn because of the ways Twain caricatures Jim. There are good reasons why these books are on the most-banned list; that they record liberal blind-spots is not among them.Moreover, Gladwell’s thinly veiled hostility toward To Kill a Mockingbird betrays a fundamental misapprehension about the novel, as distinct from the satire or the polemic. Following George Orwell, he seems to want novels to provoke “a change of structure” rather than “a change in spirit.” That is, he wants them not to be novels.No one is going to canonize Harper Lee as the high priestess of negative capability (just as no one would nominate Orwell for high priest.) But the durability of To Kill a Mockingbird would seem to vindicate her method. Despite the “limitations” of Atticus’ worldview, the narrative that encompasses it has – no less than the righteous rage of reformers – paved the way for an epochal, and as yet incomplete, revolution in the way Americans think about race. And unlike a legal verdict, no one can overturn it. Not even the Roberts court. Not even Malcolm Gladwell.

1.
This is one of those weeks in which everyone talks about Harry Potter, and in which it’s tempting to be that writer, you know that writer, who does the jaded contrarian take on it all. There would be some grounds for it. At times like these, the force of Pottermania can feel like an eclipse, blocking out the light of sense and reason. Try to engage someone in a serious conversation about the merits of the movies this week, and you’ll see what I mean. Even professional critics have always trod softly around these films, generally thumbing them up. But you can excavate hints of ambivalence from even the most positive reviews, when they do things like call The Sorcerer’s Stone “fun and harmless” (Salon) or note that The Half-Blood Prince; “opens and closes well” (Ebert).

Caveat emptor: when I have watched the movies, it’s usually been at home, so that I can keep my finger hovering over the fast-forward button, skipping from one transcendent glimpse of Alan Rickman to the next. (That voice, that voice!) Even when one did upend my expectations – like Alfonso Cuarón’sPrisoner of Azkaban – much depended on my private image of Cuarón in the enemy territory of a boardroom, raising his fists at the Hollywood suits, insisting that Hermione must wear that pink hoodie as a matter of Art, Beauty and Truth. In other words: I fed my enthusiasm with a parable about the liberation of the creative class, and not so much the movie itself.

But this is a week in which I keep wondering what I’m missing by being, well, like that. The easy money for a critic is to rail on about the corporate pablum of the monoculture. But on some level people do want their Potter-inspired tears, it truly means something to them. Hollywood PR flackery is at best only a partial culprit. Most of the people who will arrive at the movie theatre in nervous anticipation this Friday night are not mere automatons of a capitalist machine. Listening to them on the news, in all the endless End Of An Era pieces, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the depth of the longing in their voices. It’s like the memory of something very good is just beyond their reach, and the movie promises, if vaguely, to remind them of it.

There is something bittersweet and even, I know, I know, we shouldn’t use this word anymore but, sacred in that. Something we should be less afraid to acknowledge. Glib analysis of the means of cultural production is comparatively comforting, I know, because dollars and cents are concrete, things we can put in a spreadsheet, calculate out, close the file on. But just because the ink dries up when we go to set this other thing on paper doesn’t mean we should ignore it.

See, the great mystery of Rowling’s skill is that she just knew how to elicit this kind of attachment. We can talk about this in litcrit-approved terms, if you like. The usual line is that the Potter books are storytelling in the old vein, stuffing their readers so full of plot they haven’t a moment to consider anything else. There’s a truth to that: I do not think of Rowling as a “good writer,” exactly. Her skills are better classified as imaginary, which I, for one, don’t think of as a consolation prize. (The imagination is a good chunk of the distance between writing good, lasting fiction and writing criticism on the internet.) There’s a wide and often mysterious abyss between the transporting power of Rowling’s ideas and her ability to set them down in language. And let’s not overstate the dichotomy between the where, what, why and how of a story, and the way it is written; trip over too many bad sentences, too much stiff dialogue, and all the Fawkeses and Pensieves and Rooms of Requirement will be lost to you, no matter their other powers of enchantment.

But all those observations explain very little, because I’d bet you know those references. Because even if you are an excessively cerebral, overly verbal, altogether too critical person (like me), you probably lived the cliché, and on at least one, and perhaps several, nights in the last ten years, stayed up til four a.m. devouring all of this imperfectly articulated fancy.

2.There is the element of age to consider. I am actually a bit older than the generation who actually grew up with Pottermania. I only remember hearing of the series around the time Goblet of Fire came out, which would have made me 21 that first very late night. And even to 21, adventures composed to appeal to 11 through 14 seem a bit naive, a bit, you know, young.

But I keep thinking of this: a few years ago I was at a dinner party, where the particular cross-section of my friends in attendance was decidedly bookish in character. They were of the I-have-a-corporate-job-but-also-an-English-degree type, prone to direct all casual talk to reading (past, present, and future). The ferocity of their quasi-literary posturing can be surprising, sure, but it’s just that the rest of the life they’ve built is predicated on the irrelevance of something that once meant so much to them. (The sincerity of that hunger is what keeps these people from seeming pretentious to me, if you’re wondering.) At one point in the conversation people began comparing favorite books, by which they seemed to mean books that had been integral to the way they saw the world, to the way they understood things. And I remember suddenly developing an enormous interest in the (bad) wine, drinking rapidly to keep from talking seriously, because the prospect of saying something tipsy and silly was less embarrassing than reporting the actual truth.

Which is that there is no book in the world that has had quite the effect on who I am as L.M. Montgomery’sAnne of Green Gables. In imagining the epitome of beauty, my mind still defaults to violet eyes and alabaster brows. I find myself unreasonably susceptible to falling for jerks because my paradigmatic suitor was one who first hinted at his love by way of calling her “Carrots.” Whenever I do cringeworthy things in my life, which is to say every day, the Mrs. Rachel Lynde that book installed in my psyche intones anew: “Anne. Shirley. You are HEEDLESS and IMPULSIVE.” (Forgive the italics, another Montgomery indulgence.)

But I know, as well as you do, that in dinner party conversations like that one, some such pedestrian book is not The Right Answer. I have loved my copy of Anne to literal pieces, the spine cracked and fragile, the edges of the pages grass-stained from the backyards and parks I used to read in before I grew old enough for bars and coffeeshops. But I know it is not a “literary masterpiece.” So the inner buzzer sounds, do not pass go, try again. Once more, with Roberto Bolaño or A.S. Byatt or David Foster Wallace, please.

Isn’t it funny that this is what happens to us? That even if you love books, if you start to dedicate your life to them, a light goes out, somehow. You come to know them with your brain rather than your soul. Maybe it’s just one more sad example of how you’ve grown up. And I know, I know, in some ways these books aren’t just “un-literary” – there are parts of them that are flat-out dishonest, sentimental, destructive. It’s not that all those endless lessons on technique I’ve internalized aren’t right, strictly speaking. But it isn’t the least bit of hyperbole for me to say that as an adult who is a voracious reader, I know that I am going to spend the rest of my life not quite managing to love a book the way I loved Anne, to read it the way I did the first, second, thirty-fifth time. I know that the rest of my reading life is just a thinly-disguised effort to forge a path back to that, but I’ll never get there.

So I admit that when I read Harry Potter, the main appeal of it is how it tries to reach me the way Anne once did.

Maybe you find that a strange thing to say. I wouldn’t argue with you that the Anne and Harry Potter books are worlds apart in diction, tone, setting. Anne’s milieu is anti-magical, its animating spirit best stated as the well-scrubbed Canadian practicality of your favorite great-aunt. Meanwhile, Harry rarely cracks a book in the Potter series, much less seems to want to write one. But there is one important sense in which the books are kindred spirits, as Anne would say. Annes and Harrys – and their intended readers – are people with whole lives of possibility before them. They do not have cars and mortgages and 401(k)s. If they are acquainted with certain grim facts of life – are orphans – the promise of more disappointment, or even just of the status quo, does not yet seem the only thing that life could hold. Annes and Harrys belong to a time in one’s life when living is a glass you’ve yet to fill. When you can be a writer if you just want it badly enough.

Perhaps most importantly: when it is still dimly possible that on any given afternoon a giant will sweep you away from your ugly little life and inform you that you are the savior of all Wizardkind.

3.The kind of critics who find all human joy suspicious use accusatory tones when they call this sort of thing “escapist.” Here, for them, is a bit of realism: I can still tell you, without looking it up, that The Deathly Hallows was released on the 21st of July, 2007.

I was then living in New York, working at a corporate law firm. A friend of mine was in town that month, visiting her boyfriend. Uncharacteristically, she kept cancelling our appointments to go out. But I thought very little of it, because I was too busy contemplating the corner I had backed my own life into.

Then one morning her boyfriend sent me an email at work: “I am at the hospital. S. is sick. Please come.”

A thing you wouldn’t know, if you’ve not much personal experience with medicine, is how breathtakingly uncertain everything can be. How many procedures are “exploratory.” How much time you’ll spend waiting for an answer that amounts to, “We just don’t know.” How the wrong thing to do is to hope that they will say that they have located the problem, that they have a plan to fix it, that they will hold off the siege of the illness in the following well-defined and concrete list of ways. The best thing you can expect is to have the strength to expect nothing.

It was in such a context that it was determined, after a number of days, that the thing they would try to do for S. was a procedure with a fancy name that, to you and I, translates as cutting into someone’s skull. It was determined that this would happen on the morning of the 21st of July, 2007.

That morning, her boyfriend and I took a walk around the West Village. It was very sunny, which offended for the obvious reason and also because neither of us had slept much. Over the past few days he and I had talked each other out, so we said little.

We got coffee at one of those shops where they make designs in the foam. The barista made me a heart. I was not in the mood. I took a sip, dissolving it.

Then I saw all those credulous people lined up outside a Barnes and Noble, and I remembered what day it was. When the store opened, I bought the book. And then we went back to the waiting room.

I had not read anything longer than a tabloid magazine in days, but I got about halfway through before they wheeled her back. And told us everything had gone well.

This was the climax of the story, the return, the recovery. But I admit, a bit shamefully: it took my eyes a moment to focus, looking up. I didn’t come directly back. But the next breath I took, out there in the real world, was that of someone surfacing after a long stretch underwater.

And some of you will call me a credulous, sentimental fool, but maybe reality had been too much for me. When I got to the end of the book, which was that day or maybe the next, I don’t remember, but when I got to that part of Harry’s death-dream where:

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”

Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth does that mean that it is not real?”

There’s no less embarrassing way to say this: I wept.

But whether it was for Harry, or Dumbledore, or for the child I used to be, who was once comforted by such pretty nonsense, I could not tell you.

“Of course the child narrator is not a new construct, [insert Salinger/Glass reference here]…”. My particular interest for this essay was this set of new-ish novels. But when I challenge Krauss to a face-off with my book, “The History of Precociousness,” there will certainly be a chapter on the Glass children.

I really liked this piece. I was hardly a child prodigy either, but I did request the Oxford Unabridged English Dictionary for Christmas when I was twelve or thirteen, and there’s something retroactively comforting about encountering children in literature who are as hopelessly geeky as I was in real life. Outright prodigies can be cloying, but if I’m reading a book narrated by anyone under eighteen or so, I’d just as soon the kid be halfway interesting.

I like this piece, with one small caveat: pretty sure B.R. Myers refered solely to the Safran Foer novel. The playfulness of the other novels to which you falsely direct Myers’ words seem less spurious to me than the Safran Foer novel. You set up something of a straw man argument when you appropriate his words and use them to describe novels other than he had intended.

We’re everywhere. Poets and children’s book writers. Novelists and memoirists. Painters and sculptors, dancers and actors. We clean your teeth, snake the clogs in your drain, and drop off color copies to your desk during the week.

1.
A couple of weeks ago, browsing through a literary magazine, I turned — like most writers — to the final section: the contributors’ notes. As my finger traced over the two dozen or so names, I felt a giddy mixture of apprehension and excitement: Who did I make it in with? Am I sandwiched between a 68-page Joyce Carol Oates story told from the point-of-view of a Steve Bannon-a-like and a Ron Carlson piece waxing romantically about his boyhood in Utah? No. All were unfamiliar names — a combined mass of the up-and-coming MFA students of America, a respectable mid-tier covey of professors, and one or two writers from outside of the academic system.

The series of quasi-biographical statements made references to a wife here, a dog there, a college town somewhere in the Midwest. The contributors’ notes manifested as potted CVs, detailing professorships, university press books, semi-prestigious fellowships, names of MFA programs. Almost 90 percent of the biographical space listed the other literary journals the writers had been in, other places readers could hunt down their work. The stream of journal titles became an indicator of stature, a look-see-here, I’m in the Kenyon Review! And you’re not. My own note was just as guilty of journal-shaming.

Still, in my time reading literary magazines, I’ve read some egregious proclamations, including one obscure novelist declaring his work to be the heir to Franz Kafka’s oeuvre. On other occasions: I’ve ripped out the cutesy baby pictures published in Glimmer Train; I’ve wondered if anyone contacts the writers who include their e-mail addresses and Twitter handles; I’ve laughed at writers’ insistence on providing wacky lists of mundane and weird jobs, these romantic notions of the literary outsider.

2.Some years ago, I published a short story involving an ever more fractious dialogue between the contributors of a made-up journal The Tenure Quarterly Review. Arranged as contributors’ notes, the story assaulted the ponderous and solipsistic nature of the genre. To complicate matters, the story had its own tumultuous publication history. For some inexplicable reason, the story’s title and my name appeared above the journal’s real contributors’ notes and my story was nowhere to be seen. My name hung there as the author of other people’s lives. When I showed a close friend the magazine, he joked I was the Creator, the God of these poets and fiction writers. In truth, I was much less than this. I was an embarrassed MFA student. No doubt there had been a botch-up at the printers, or someone had figured out the actual contributors’ notes were more compelling than my story.

We read such stories as Robin Hemley’s “Reply All” (e-mail chain), Rob Cohen’s “The Varieties of Romantic Experience: An Introduction” (lecture), Rick Moody’s “Primary Sources” (works cited), and Daniel Orozco’s “Officers Weep” (police blotter). At the time in workshop, Vollmer termed such work artifact fiction. A good deal of the forms were nonfiction and taken from academia or the world of employment. When the class took on this writing challenge, it occurred to me this sort of form appropriation were our last impotent jabs at the jobs we had left behind or were facing post-graduation.

The day of my workshop, one smart aleck noted how my chosen form had already been done. I glanced up, mystified. The student went onto discuss Michael Martone’s 2005 story collection Michael Martone, an entire book of fictional contributor notes about Michael Martone. Very quickly I realized I had written an imitation without ever having read the original. Worse than feeling parasitical, I felt derivative.

After class, I bought a copy of Martone’s book, but stopped short of reading it. I changed my story from revolving around a single character to be polyphonous, with each new contributor’s note having its own voice and role in the story. After some polishing, Vollmer liked the differences from Martone’s set-up and encouraged me to send out the story. Within a couple of weeks, a journal snapped up the story. After the misprinting fiasco, it took a long while for the story to be seen in print. E-mails to the editors went unanswered. Facebook requests were denied. It was not until AWP the following year that I managed to convince one of the higher-ups to run the story properly. In my follow-up e-mail, I included a very short and sober biography; a contributor’s note so dull and bland it would be invisible.

3.Let’s call this essay what it is: a call-to-action. We have the chance to make contributors’ notes better. Perhaps “Great Again,” if you are of a certain political persuasion. Yet, thanks to Mr. Martone, fictionalized pieces feel too done, too passé. Whereas polemics against Donald Trump seem too obvious, too prone to a $1 billion lawsuit. Emoji are too 2010. Morse Code panders to the longshoremen hipster crowd. We need to go post-genre, post-text.

I envision the final pages of our nation’s literary magazines to be invisibly divided into sections: each one the equivalent of a blank 4×6 notecard. The voids offer up slates for others to write-in their dreams and aspirations for us. MFA cohorts, parents, well-wishers, or frenemies can fill the spaces. They can rewrite the lives of the writers’ loved/hated ones and ink the lucrative book deals or vanity-publishing ventures. As God-like Creators, these others can tell the stories of agents, editors, cats (both living and deceased), supportive husbands and wives, bitter writer spouses, divorce lawyers, potential bunkmates. And, yes, even the names of future children. Or perhaps we should avoid these pseudo-omnipotent hijinks, and leave the spaces untouched, like a gessoed canvas. The post-text era of contributors’ notes allows us to focus on what matters, 10, 20, 30 pages back: the work.